Legal personhood rests on punishability and moral judgment, which corporations lack

Evidence

What does it mean for something to be, from the perspective of law, a “person”? Machen begins by following Maitland, suggesting that, legally, personhood is “not a rational, living creature similar to a man, but a mere ‘subject of rights,’” not something inherently equivalent to a human being. If a corporation is a “subject of rights,” then under the law, it could be considered a person. But Machen complicates this simple understanding of personhood: in practice, personhood is not about rights but liabilities, which are found in an ability to understand punishment for violation of law. For Machen, morality and rationality are central for understanding one’s legal position. A person, for Machen, must be something the state can punish and something that acts in a way that grasps the potential of punishment. Thus, Machen concludes, “the proposition ‘A corporation is a person’ is either a mere metaphor or is a fiction of law.” Although corporations, Machen argues, are real, they cannot be considered persons because of the absence of morality and rationality. A corporation cannot, in and of itself, understand particular actions as punishable by law, because it lacks the moral faculty of judgment. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 382

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the key legal distinction between real existence (which corporations have) and personhood (which requires moral liability the corporation cannot hold).
• XREF: Inverts nicely onto the modern influencer: an individual human carrying the moral judgment of a corporation—the inversion central to the reader’s Corpocene thesis. — connects to: Corporations resist ethical chastisement because they are not human individuals — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 145
• ADDENDUM: Supports the essay on corporate personhood: Machen here argues the corporation cannot be a legal person because it lacks moral judgment, the very capacity a human influencer possesses.